Author: Francisco Eugenio Martorell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Author: Vasudha Rangaprasad
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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My dissertation examines the determinants of school quality and its impact on student achievement. The first essay studies the impact of class size on student achievement. The impact of class size on student achievement remains an open question despite hundreds of empirical studies and the perception amongst parents, teachers, and policymakers that larger classes are a significant detriment to student development. This essay attempts to shed new light on this ambiguity by explicitly recognizing the distributed nature of educational outcomes. This paper utilizes recently developed nonparametric tests for stochastic dominance to uniformly rank entire distributions of test scores. Moreover, by using bootstrap techniques, we are able to report the results of the dominance tests to a degree of statistical certainty. This type of analysis is very useful for policy decisions as it lends itself to broad-based, consensus ranking of outcomes. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, we estimate the effects of eighth and tenth grade class size on the unconditional and conditional distributions of contemporaneous test scores, subsequent test scores, and test score gains. The results are quite surprising. First, after controlling for a host of determinants of student achievement, we find compelling evidence suggesting that students benefit from relatively large classes. Second, we document several instances where the relationship between student achievement and class size is non-monotonic. Finally, these conclusions are unaltered when we allow for heterogeneous effects of class size by student race or subject matter. In my second essay, I address questions regarding school competition using a spatial autoregressive model. Education reforms involving expanded school choice are receiving increased attention. Many view the heightened competition that would presumably result from such reforms as a panacea for the ills currently plaguing the US public education system. However, the present system is not devoid of competition even absent such reforms; public schools compete for students through the Tiebout (1956) process. Thus, this essay seeks to answer two questions: (i) Does competition alter the behavior of public school districts? and (ii) Do public school districts compete with neighboring public school districts? To answer such questions, we utilize panel data from Illinois over the period 1990-2000 and estimate a multi-dimensional mixed regressive, spatial autoregressive model via instrumental variables, thereby eliminating the possibility of confounding strategic competition with spatial error correlation. The data come from two sources: the Common Core of Data and the Census of Population and Housing. We find robust evidence that public school districts incorporate the educational input decisions of other public school districts in the same county into their decision calculus, thereby acting strategically when setting own input levels. Thus, reforms leading to expansion of school choice would not introduce competition into the US school system, but rather would at best accentuate the level of competition. The third essay examines the impact of peer group effects on student achievement. The current empirical evidence on the magnitude of these effects is, however, inconclusive. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I assess the impact of peer group influences on the test scores of tenth grade students using school-by-subject specific fixed effects models, as well as a Generalized Methods of Moments approach (via instrumental variables) to account for potential endogeneity of the peer group formation. The results are striking. In particular, I fail to uncover widespread evidence in favor of positive peer group effects. The OLS estimations yield strong and positive effects of peer group achievement on test score gains. When I account for potential endogeneity of peer group formation via instrumental variables and fixed effects these effects disappear. In addition, the dispersion of peer group achievement has no systematic influence on achievement growth. Moreover, I find no evidence supporting the hypothesis that peer effects have differential impacts in schools in which tracking is present. The only exception to the above findings is in models that control for both peer effects and tracking, and allow the effect of each to differ according to student ability. In this case, while the impact of tracking is not found to be substantially different in tracked versus nontracked schools, the results are consistent with a nonuniform effect of tracking on achievement across students of different abilities. Finally, these fundamental conclusions are not substantially altered when I allow for changes in the definitions of peer group effect and tracking.

Author: Justin A. Wong
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.

Author: Katie Lynn Raynor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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The unifying theme of this dissertation is the empirical analysis of the determinants of educational success. The first essay asks whether high school time use affects the probability that a high school graduate attends college. These effects may be due to acceptance decisions by colleges or because different time uses actually change the amount of educational attainment an individual desires. Three types of high school time use are considered: doing homework outside school, participating in extracurricular activities, and working for pay. The data used for this essay, as well as for the other two essays, are from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88). Instrumental variables analysis suggests that the time spent on homework outside school may be the most important type of time use, and it may have a very large positive effect on four-year college attendance. The second essay identifies how high school time use affects college GPA for individuals attending their first year at four-year colleges, using the same three types of high school time use as in the previous essay. College time use is imputed using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) since this information is not available in the NELS:88. The results indicate that high school time use is important in determining GPA during the first year of college, where part of this effect is due to the fact that spending more time on homework during high school increases an individual's ability level, which later increases college GPA. The purpose of the third essay is to analyze whether living at home with one's parents will affect a college student's gradepoint average. For students from higher income families, college GPA's will be significantly higher if they live away from home. However, living at home during college does not negatively affect GPA for those from lower income families.

Author: Justin A. Wong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.

Author: Anjali Priya Verma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation examines the determinants of disparity in education and labor market outcomes. The first chapter, co-authored with Imelda, examines the impact of clean energy access on adult health and labor supply outcomes by exploiting a nationwide roll-out of clean cooking fuel program in Indonesia. This program led to a large-scale fuel switching, from kerosene, a dirty fuel, to liquid petroleum gas, a cleaner one. Using longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and exploiting the staggered structure of the program rollout, we find that access to clean cooking fuel led to a significant improvement in women’s health, particularly among those who spend most of their time indoors doing housework. We also find an increase in women’s work hours, suggesting that access to cleaner fuel can improve women’s health and plausibly their productivity, allowing them to supply more market labor. For men, we find an increase in the work hours and propensity to have an additional job, mainly in households where women accrued the largest health and labor benefits from the program. These results highlight the role of clean energy in reducing gender disparity in health and point to the existence of positive externalities from the improved health of women on other members of the household. The second paper studies the labor supply response of women to changes in expected alimony income. Using an alimony law change in the US that significantly reduced the post-divorce alimony support among women, I first show that this led to an increase in divorce probability. Second, consistent with the theoretical prediction from a simple model of labor supply, the reform led to an increase in the female labor force participation, with a larger increase among ever-married and more educated samples of women. As a result, the average female wage income increased after the reform. While labor supply increased, I show that most of this increase was concentrated in part-time employment, which may not be sufficient to compensate for the expected loss in alimony income. In light of the recent movement in the US to reform alimony laws, these findings are pertinent to understand its implications on women’s labor supply and economic well-being. The third chapter, co-authored with Akiva Yonah Meiselman, studies the long-run effects of disruptive peers in disciplinary schools on educational and labor market outcomes of students placed at these institutions. Students placed at disciplinary schools tend to have significantly worse future outcomes. We provide evidence that the composition of peers at these institutions plays an important role in explaining this link. We use rich administrative data of high school students in Texas which provides a detailed record of each student’s disciplinary placements, including their exact date of placement and assignment duration. This allows us to identify the relevant peers for each student based on their overlap at the institution. We leverage within school-year variation in peer composition at each institution to ask whether a student who overlaps with particularly disruptive peers has worse subsequent outcomes. We show that exposure to peers in highest quintile of disruptiveness relative to lowest quintile when placed at a disciplinary school increases students’ subsequent removals, reduces their educational attainment, and worsens labor market outcomes. Moreover, these effects are stronger when students have a similar peer group in terms of the reason for removal, or when the distribution of disruptiveness among peers is more concentrated than dispersed around the mean. Our findings draw attention to an unintended consequence of student removal to disciplinary schools, and highlights how brief exposures to disruptive peers can affect an individual’s long-run trajectories

Author: Juan-Pedro Garces
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages :

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In this dissertation we explore different aspects of the relationship between education (as one of the main components of human capital) and economic productivity. In the first chapter, we measure the factors that contribute to the quality of education, following Hanushek and Woessmann (2007). An empirical research is carried out for the case of Chile, a country which implemented a very unique educational system in the mid-1980s, with a strong participation of the private sector in the provision of educational services. Amongst other factors, we study the influence of the public/private divide, the socio-economic level of the students and the pupil/teacher ratio. The quality of education is measured by the performance of students in standardised national tests administered to all schools in Chile. The second chapter explores the effects of population density on productivity and the synergetic impact of educational attainment and population density on the causation of technological progress and economic growth, following Becker et al. (1999). We devise a simple theoretical model to explain the channels through which education and density affect productivity, and we test it for a wide sample of developed and developing countries. Our empirical results confirm the positive impact of both population density—broadly defined—and the interaction of education and density on economic productivity. Finally, the third chapter of the dissertation examines the ongoing controversy about the roles of education and institutions as main contributing factors of economic growth. To try to establish a balanced view, we first assume as a premise that good institutional governance is indeed an important factor in promoting economic growth, as has been shown repeatedly in the literature. But at the same time, we investigate the causes of good institutional governance, and find out that educational attainment is one of the main factors contributing to most of the aspects of good governance.

Author: James Merewood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Lyliana Elizabeth Gayoso de Ervin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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In the third essay, I use survival analysis techniques to identify factors affecting primary school drop out by Guarani, Spanish, and bilingual speaking students. The results indicate that language-disadvantaged students, the Guarani speakers, are more likely to drop out at any grade after second grade, and the risk of dropping out is highest after sixth grade. The overall findings of this dissertation reveal that language plays an important role in educational outcomes.

Author: Audrieanna Tremise Burgin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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My dissertation includes three essays on educational attainment and labor outcomes, where each paper details an interesting topic related to education. Chapter 1 is the introduction of my dissertation. In Chapter 2, I estimate the correlation between parental wealth and educational attainment across age groups of 0-5, 6-10, 11-14, 15-18, and 19-25. Chapter 2 matches individual data to their corresponding family data. The data is compiled from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore whether parental wealth during childhood correlates to the individual's educational attainment. I hypothesize that wealth has a positive relationship to educational attainment and that parental wealth during these age groups of childhood is an essential driver of differences in achievement later in life. My analysis concludes that parental wealth has a statistically significant correlation to educational attainment. When analyzed across age groups, parental wealth has the most substantial relationship to ages 0-5, the individual's early childhood education years. In Chapter 3, I explore the relationship of spousal education on labor outcomes for women using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The main research question is whether the husband's level of education correlates to the wife's earnings. The sample includes controls for race and educational level for the females. Additionally, for comparison, my analysis is also estimated for men. Then, the additional regressions compare how spousal education correlates to females' earnings versus how spousal education correlates to earnings for males. I find that the perceived benefits of marriage are more robust for men and women. In Chapter 4, I analyze academic achievement and efficacy in the Lake Wales Charter School System of Lake Wales, Florida. I use school-level data to conduct a difference-in-difference estimation of Lake Wales Charter Schools compared to Polk County Public Schools. Additionally, I run a difference-in-difference estimation for the Lake Wales Charter School system up to four years post-implementation. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of my dissertation.